Meeting in the Roosevelt Room on Human Rights Day

Did you miss it? Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the United Nation General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Barack Obama, as he was leaving for Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, declared December 10 Human Rights Day. To help mark it, his national security advisor, the retired Marine General James L. Jones, at left, invited representatives of a number of human rights and related groups including CPJ to meet with him and other senior national security advisors in the White House.

We met in the Roosevelt Room to discuss what FDR
called “the human condition.” “I reiterated the president’s strong and
unwavering commitment to the advancement of human rights and democracy around
the world, including the right to choose one’s leaders, to speak one’s mind, to
assemble freely, and to worship as one pleases,” read Gen. Jones’ statement on Human
Rights Day.

I told the general and the assembled National
Security Council directors how pleased CPJ was with Obama’s
remarks on World Press Freedom Day in May about both unsolved journalist
murders in many nations around the world, and the ongoing jailing of
journalists in many other nations. (CPJ just released our imprisoned
list for 2009, and half of the jailed journalists are online journalists
and nearly half are freelancers.) I also volunteered that the POTUS’ recent
granting of an exclusive
interview to Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez shortly after she was beaten by
state security agents was nothing less than a brilliant move.

But also I noted that the administration still
had more to do to advance human rights and press freedom. In particular, the
Obama administration needs to end the U.S. military’s ongoing practice of
detaining journalists without charging them with a crime or giving them due
process of law. The practice began with the Bush administration.

No fewer than 14
journalists have been held behind bars without ever being charged in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq,
or Afghanistan.
All but one were later released, including Sami
al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera who was held in Guantanamo for more than
six years. The one journalist still in U.S.
custody is an Iraqi photographer for Reuters, Ibrahim Jassam, who has been held
for the past 14 months in Iraq.
Senators on both sides of the aisle—from the veteran Indiana Republican Richard
Lugar to the Democrat from Obama’s own state of Illinois, Richard Durbin—have
spoken about the need for the United States to set an example
in words as well as in deeds for other nations when it comes to human rights
and press freedom around the world.

CPJ has been long asking—since January when we
sent then-President elect Obama a
letter—the new administration to announce that it is ending the U.S. military
practice of holding journalists without charging them, and to start with Jassam,
by either releasing him or charging him with a crime. We can only wait and see
how Gen. Jones might advise the president to handle the matter. If
administration officials wanted to peg it to human rights, they still have
time. Besides proclaiming December 10 Human Rights Day, President Obama also proclaimed
the ensuing days Human Rights Week.